“But the second dream, the one you pick when you grow up—that’s all about comfort. Warmth. Enough food in your belly, not worrying about your car throwing a rod or how to pay your bills or whether you can afford to buy something better than the generic box of macaroni and cheese.”
Her words were bizarrely familiar, but maybe it was just that they were so very bland. Although “throw a rod” had a nice specificity—oh lord, he was workshopping his night nurse’s sentences. Talk about the generic box of macaroni and cheese. His thoughts go back to the woman at the window, swathed, her face averted—that, too, is familiar.
“She spoke to me—it reminded me of a movie. A terrible movie based on a very good book. Ghost Story!” He trumpets the book ’s name so loudly that Aileen winces. But being able to come up with that title makes him all the more sure that it wasn’t a dream, that his mental faculties are fine. “Did you ever read it, by chance?”
He feels foolish as soon as the words are out. Aileen has made it very clear that she does not read. “It was a movie, too, although you would have been—” He has no idea how old she would have been. “Much too young to see it, maybe not even born. I was in my twenties when it came out. It had some very famous people in it. Fred Astaire. John Houseman.”
Her face is so stolidly blank at those two names that he kind of wants to throttle her. She must be younger than she looks to be stone-faced at the mention of Astaire. Fred Astaire is a name that brings only joy; one would have to be a soulless, heartless husk of a person not to smile at the very thought of Astaire, even those who (wrongly) preferred Gene Kelly. Wait, was Gene Kelly in Ghost Story? No, but it did have Melvyn Douglas, who indirectly spawned that insanely gorgeous, curvy granddaughter, the one who showed up in some Scorsese films.
It’s interesting, Gerry thinks, the order in which the men die (or don’t die) in Ghost Story, how it aligns with the audience’s natural affections toward the actors. Take Douglas Fairbanks Jr., the first to go. No one remembers him anyway. There’s a logic to Douglas’s death, a culpability in the larger story, but Gerry has forgotten the details. And of course frosty Houseman has to die.
But never Astaire. Astaire survived even the Towering Inferno.
As did O.J.
With Aileen’s help, he navigates the “SmartHub” on the television and finds a version to rent, inviting her to watch with him. She looks dubious. “Seems a bad idea, to watch a scary movie now.” But Gerry assures her that the scares are mostly jump shocks. He screened it for his class at Goucher, after having them read the novel on which it was based. The exercise was intended to make his students see what the written word could do with suggestion, how flat-footed film, with its myriad tricks, could be. He could watch Ghost Story all night long and never feel anything deeper than annoyance. But he wouldn’t read it tonight on a bet. The book was absolutely terrifying and surprisingly erudite. The passages about teaching—an instructor at the height of his powers, his subsequent fall from grace—are outstanding, as good as any Gerry has read. Maybe even written.
And yet, he feels as if this is the scene that has just played out, his own Ghost Story—a woman, face averted, with that beautiful voice.
The voice he stole.
The voice he stole.
Not from the real-life Aubrey, who does not, in fact, exist, not really. When he gave his creation a voice—how had he never realized this before—he had taken the beautiful vowels of the actress in this movie, the one who also had been in Chariots of Fire. For a moment, when he was in his twenties, she had seemed to be everywhere. Then, suddenly, she was nowhere. The culture has such an endless appetite for beautiful young women, like a volcano, requiring sacrifice after sacrifice. Only a few women have long acting careers and they are seldom the great beauties.
But the culture does it to young men, too. And not just handsome ones. Not just actors! Gerry has written better books since Dream Girl, even critics agree on this. But he has never mattered quite as much as he did in that fleeting moment; nothing can be written about him without citing that one particular novel, whereas older writers were allowed to transcend individual titles. Gerry always felt more in step with the writers of the previous generation. They were the little pigs who built their houses of brick, whereas Gerry’s peers tended more to straw and wood.
And, oh, how people loved to blow them down. Everybody huffs and puffs, intent on destruction. What do they call it now? Cancel culture.
Lord, the movie is really terrible, even worse than he remembered. He hopes Straub got a lot of money for it. Yet it’s so naked, so wonderfully literally naked, in a way that movies aren’t anymore. Alice Krige—ah, yes, that’s the actress’s name—has very natural breasts that are on display quite a bit, but there’s also the leading man’s penis. He’s falling to his death from a great height when you see it, but still, it’s an example of equal opportunity nudity.
“The women in this movie have nothing to do but bicker at the men,” Aileen grumbles at one point. “They’re better actresses than that.”
“Alma is a huge part. She’s the center of it all.”
“Not her. The wives. One of them is—well, that one”—she indicates Patricia Neal, on-screen with Astaire—“she’s famous, right?”
“She is, and yet—I couldn’t name a single film which she was in.”
“Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” Aileen says promptly. “Funny because she shouldn’t even be—anyway, she’s in that and she was in The Subject Was Roses.”
She doesn’t know Astaire, but she has seen these films? “How old are you, Aileen?”
She stiffens. “That’s not a question to ask a lady. I’m older than I look, let’s just leave it at that.”
Funny, he would have sworn it went the other way, that her weight and mannerisms aged her. “Did you grow up in Baltimore? Do you remember Picture for a Sunday Afternoon?”
Her eyes are fixed on the screen. The film’s alleged shocks seem to have no effect on her. They are pretty weak and she is, after all, a nurse. But she pays strict attention. She does not answer his question, does not speak again until the end of the film, when she says, “That makes no sense. The woman’s still dead. They still killed her. Why do any of them get to live?”
“In the book—”
“I”—She stops, almost as if she is trying to tamp down anger, out of respect, but she’s not quite successful. “I don’t care about the book. This is a movie, I’m watching a movie, and according to this movie, if four men put a girl in a car and roll it into the lake while she’s still alive and she dies a horrible death, one of them gets to take his wife to France!”
“He is the least culpable,” Gerry offers, thinking, And it’s Fred Astaire. You don’t kill Fred Astaire. In The Towering Inferno, Jennifer Jones died, but Astaire lived. Gerry saw that film in the old Rotunda Cinemas, where he saw so many movies. Monty Python and the Holy Grail, most of Woody Allen’s work. Was that the Baltimore theater that had shown The Rocky Horror Picture Show? Antici—SAY IT—pation! No, that had played in another, larger venue. The Rotunda had been a dark, smelly dump of a place, off a narrow hallway in a large brick building that was sort of a mini-mall. Gerry felt up a couple of girls in that movie theater. He misses it. The last time he drove past the Rotunda, the old enclosed shopping center was surrounded by new apartments, and the movie theater was now a detached structure, something called a CinéBistro. What the fuck is a CinéBistro? What is happening to words?
Aileen marches downstairs, grumbling to herself. Gerry sleeps better than he has in days, paradoxically relaxed by the movie’s insipid, special-effects horrors. Maybe he should watch more movies, less news.
When he wakes, he can barely wait for Phylloh’s shift to start so he can ask her to review the security camera’s video. She hems and haws, says she’s not supposed to do this for residents, but he cajoles and bullies until he gets his way.
She calls back at about eleven A.M.
“I looked at the hours between midnight and three,” she says.